August 2010 App Stores Report

Thanks to the company Distimo we have a report of how the most important application Stores for mobile phones are behaving. This document is available to anyone who wants to know a little more about, here and reports only the results in the United States. The summary of what's shows this document will be related to Apple App Store and Android Market.

It is interesting to read that the Android Market is the store with more free applications hosted in their servers, with the 60%, when we have and iPhone App store with the 29% of share and a 26% for the iPad App Store. This means that we could find more free apps in a Android Device than a iOS one, although most of those are not even worth downloading.

This also impact on the consumer, where they get more used to pay for an application that generates and interest on them. Another curious detail is that is estimated that 60% of the applications in Android along with App Store are below or equal to $ 2, making vast majority of applications for payment very cheap. Continuing with the prices, on average, the cheapest store to buy and app will be the Android Market, with a $3.23 for all paid apps, when the iPhone is 4.31 and 5.01 for the iPad App Store.

When we talk about the predominant kind of app that are downloaded or purchased, games takes really good places for the iPhone App Store taking the firsts 5 places but this doesn't happend with the Google App Store, where the most popular categories are Tools and News & Weather. So if your objective is to do games, iPhone is going to be a good platform to do it (also the Game Center is a good excuse).

We can conclude that and Apple App Store is quite more expensive to maintain for a final user however we could find really good games and software that is optimized to run on its hardware. If we are seeking for a cheaper store Android Market will be, allowing the developers to use the tools that Google provides to make apps that take apart all the juice that hardware could offer, but limited to few devices only. My personal recommendation, try to make develop a great idea for a platform, try it there and then publish in another one.